Commentary and analysis to persuade people to become socialist and to act for themselves, organizing democratically and without leaders, to bring about a world of common ownership and free access. We are solely concerned with building a movement of socialists for socialism. We are not reformists with a programme of policies to patch up capitalism.

Saturday, January 31, 2015

Beware Development Aid - For Whose Agenda?

Development
used to be a battle against deprivation and dependence. Nowadays it’s
more about supporting the liberalisation of markets.

The Conservative party’s conversion to development in 2009, most
evident in its support of higher aid spending, was seen by many
campaigners as one of the development sector’s greatest successes. After
years of being seen as a concern of Christians and the left,
development had gone mainstream. Apart from a few Little Englanders on
the far right, there was a broad consensus that we should fight global
poverty.

But a closer look at One World Conservatism
– “capitalism and development was Britain’s gift to the world. Today we
have an opportunity to renew that gift by helping poor countries
kick-start growth and development” – suggests that this victory was not
all it seemed. For in equating it with the global expansion of
capitalism under the British empire, the term development has clearly
come to mean something quite different – indeed pretty much the opposite
– to that which anti-poverty campaigners had worked for over several
decades.

Back in the heyday of “development”, from the 1950s-1970s, the term had
been closely associated with national liberation governments like those
of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, which fought poverty, deprivation and dependence by using strong state intervention and provision.

Ugandan activist Yash Tandon went further, saying that development for
him meant “people’s struggle for liberation from prevailing structures
of domination and control over national policies and resources”. In
other words, development was seen as a process of breaking with colonial
exploitation and transferring power over resources from the first to
the third world. For these activists, development represented a
revolutionary struggle over the world resources.

The gutting of development of its political content wasn’t something
that happened overnight. In the 1990s, after years of right-wing
governments in the UK and US expressing the idea that poverty was an
individual responsibility, and aid budgets slashed to historically low
levels, some in the development sector actively embraced a new way of
talking about what they were doing. The UN invented a new category of
extreme poverty, denoting those who really deserved our attention, which
separated the idea of poverty from inequality.

Campaign organisations pushed a technical “non-political” set of
development policies addressing poverty at the micro level, by digging
wells and supplying fertiliser, for example. These policies promised to
lift the very poor out of their poverty so that they too could share in
the wealth of the global economy.

From here, development quickly became a very different proposition.
Because if the assumption is that more of the global economy will solve
poverty, then developing countries needed to better embed neo-liberal
policies. Aid was important because it meant using public money to
facilitate the building the sort of liberalised market necessary for
democracy and prosperity to flourish. Development became a chance for
the political right to extend economic neo-liberalism into those parts
of the world which other forms of intervention couldn’t reach.

Development, and fighting poverty, have been separated from any
conception of politics or power; a fundamental misunderstanding of what
poverty is. Poverty
isn’t simply the difference between living on $1.20 and $1.40 a day.
It’s about lacking power over those resources that you need to live a
decent life – food, water, shelter, access to healthcare, education. If
one person – or corporation – controls them, that means others don’t.

Today, in the wake of the financial crash, as those most responsible for
the economic meltdown walked away, it seems clear that neoliberalism
and globalisation has made a tiny proportion of people much better off,
while the livelihoods of many others – not to mention the environment –
has been eroded. Ironically, one of the areas of society most immune to
this erosion is development, where neoliberalism still holds sway and
has actually grown stronger.

This is why last week World Development Movement became Global Justice Now.
We have taken this radical step to show how far the pendulum has swung.
We have always maintained that poverty is deeply political. Despite
what we’ve been repeatedly told by the political elite, you cannot get
rid of poverty while a tiny minority enjoys wealth beyond imagination.
In particular, the power that big business wields today is incompatible
with a democratic society capable of solving the world’s problems.

Of course it’s true that sometimes people need immediate help – they
can’t wait for a radical transformation. But unless we build that
transformation into all of our work, the aid industry will not wither
away but grow bigger and bigger. The work of democratic states will
become the preserve of NGOs working with private companies. It’s time to
take a stand against this ever rightward drift.